Can You Recover from an Amy’s Bakery Style Social Media Meltdown?

Something truly awesome happened on Facebook on Monday night. Arizona based Amy’s Bakery Company, had a complete and utter social media meltdown. We are talking biblical proportions here people! You’ve probably read about it all ready, but I’ll set the scene anyway…

The restaurant recently featured on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – he dropped them half-way through as they were too hard to work with!

On Monday night, the owners, Samy and Amy took to Facebook to respond to some negative comments about their food and pricing

The thing is, they weren’t addressing issues in a calm and composed fashion. They lost the plot. Big time!

People on their Facebook Page started to respond, many of them landing there due to a busy thread on Reddit (which I can’t find now…)

It just got nastier and nastier. For example…

“WE ARE NOT FREAKING OUT. WE DO NOT CARE ABOUT A “WITCH HUNT’. I AM NOT A WITCH. I AM GODS CHILD. P*** OFF ALL OF YOU, F*** REDDITS, F*** YELP AND F*** ALL OF YOU. BRING IT. WE WILL FIGHT BACK”

THE USE OF CAPS LOCK REALLY MADE PEOPLE PAY ATTENTION.

Obviously we were hacked…

Once they had calmed down, they blamed hackers…

Source – Facebook.com

It’s worth noting at this point that this wasn’t confined to Facebook, the Loony Tunes behaviour was also spanning across Twitter and Yelp. Blaming hackers? Really! The FBI? Come on!!!

How can you recover from such a massive social media fail?

This is one of the worst social media fails I have ever seen. In fact, it’s one of the worst social media fails the world has ever seen. How do you recover from such a disaster? They weren’t just rude, they were insulting, their use of heavy-duty nasty words was completely out of control. As a quick aside, I love the fact that they were banging on about God being on their side! I think you may have maxed out on the big man’s backing there folks! The first step in recovery is to put your hands up and say sorry. Simple. Instead, they have shirked all responsibility and blamed it on hackers. That’s another big slide down on the ‘potential for recovery’ scale. They’ve now missed that initial apology window. What to do?

Image source – Facebook.com. My text added using skitch.

I think this one is terminal

You simply cannot expect to speak to people like this and expect to quickly rekindle any iota of positive sentiment that may have existed before. The fact that they were on Ramsay’s show would say that their product was rotten in the first place, but that could have been fixed – now they have doubled-up on the issues by monumentally alienating and hacking off a lot of people. However, with all of that in mind, they still should say sorry and be humble. And of course, sort out their business. It might just work, but it will take time.

But could this put more people through their doors?

They say no press is bad press. I think social media may well have shattered that age-old saying. But you never know, they may get people wanting to come and try the place out, and meet Samy and Amy, the people who caused a social social media F*** P**** S***storm of biblical proportions.

The key lessons from this? Don’t even think of using social media when you’re angry. Don’t be defensive, address the issues and try your hardest to help. Say sorry and be humble. If you don’t know what to do, get help. Don’t use CAPS LOCK.

Edit 16:06 15th May – I was thinking that perhaps they should take a big chunk of the money that will likely come through their doors via people wanting to visit the circus and donate it to charity? Would that help turn things around for them or would it be a hollow gesture?